In the metal community, like everywhere else, it is popular to hate on Christ because he is seen as the enemy of the total state simply because conservatives are trying to use Christianity as their competitor and substitute for the overwhelmingly popular idea of equality.
Like all demotic politics, this involves us attacking the hand-puppet and not the hand, since if you really want to oppose conservatism, just endorse Communism, or enforced total equality through the superstate. Just be honest.
Many metalheads object to Christ because of his egalitarian morality: be good to everyone, and do not engage in any of that Lex Talionis revenge on the bad, stupid, insane, cruel, tyrannical, perverse, and selfish. No, just tolerate them all and “be the bigger man” as kindergarten teachers say.
Over several decades of philosophy, I have found that politics is just a proxy for a philosophy of the good life. You either believe that this life is socialized individualism or transcendental realism, and everything else — everything — is just cope, gibberish, and cowardice.
Consequently, this is not a political site, but it mentions political concepts because — leap into life! — they rule our world. Endorsing Christ is political, Christ and Buddha were political, and we are going to have to choose some philosophy to rule us.
The worst and weakest humans after all are those who just want to be left alone. They want a personal philosophy and the world to accommodate it, and they do not care about anything but that. This is simply the bourgeois idea rephrased and we should see it as the credulous fear-porn that it is.
Black metal introduced another idea which obviated politics: naturalism. Instead of trying to reshape the world in the human form, we accept the world as it is and — most importantly — accept that nature represents a type of mathematical and logical perfection.
That means accepting natural selection, or that the weak herd animals should perish and the strong self-guided should thrive, and that civilization itself holds the key to its suicide in a fragile balance of preserving natural shaping of humanity over the tyranny of human intentions.
If you look out there at the world, almost everything is designed to obliterate not just nature and logic so that it can be replaced with human intentions.
Commerce seeks to reduce the world to a choice between products on a shelf. Politics promises that government will fix your whole world. Ideology claims Utopia involves a quest for including everyone. Socializing demands that you be edgy but not offensive to stand out from the herd so the herd likes you.
All of these things are lies and do not exist in a state of nature, but unwise humans can temporarily cause them to exist. When that temporary solution runs its arc and collides with hard reality, civilization deconstructs and barbarism returns to harvest the unpunished herd.
That offends most people because they are disgusting weak creatures who are propelled by an inner fear and therefore a tendency toward hatred for anyone who accidentally shows that this totalitarianism of spiritual fear could be something other than the only option.
Jesus, God rest his soul, tried to rebel against this, but that is because the Christ story is a simplified ripoff of the ideas Plato expressed in The Republic and Phaedo. Aristotle, like Buddhia, tried to remove genetics and the need for goal from Plato, partially successfully.
Buddha did the same thing in India, trying to bring back the Proto-Indo-European faith of godless spirituality that emphasized naturalism and rebelled against the constant tyranny of not just herd opinion but its source, individual neurosis.
Realists like myself recognize that civilizations are breeding grounds for people with high mutation load who could not survive unless given instructions. The more successful a society, the more Undermen it produces, and if it does not remove them, they take over with superior numbers.
Libertarians, Christians, Leftists, classical liberals, and all other modern types are hamsters who are trying to distract, deflect from, and tangentially escape this inevitable historical tendency. They fear naturalism and realism, and substitute pluralism for those.
The clowns of the extremes — Communism, National Socialism, theocracy, and Fascism — try to make a System that can enforce good behavior on bad people. The eugenicists were ahead of these groups: you need the pagan morality of “good to the good, bad to the bad” which means removing the bad.
You cannot make the bad into good. Everything in this essay before this point exists to bring this realization to the fore. The bad is simply bad, and cannot be patched into the good, which summarizes just about all of the failings in this review list.
But first, let’s have some news.
~~~
Birmingham Royal Ballet has decided to present a Black Sabbath ballet program featuring the music re-interpreted while people prance around on stage in an combination of athletic dance and martial arts:
Black Sabbath forged their unique sound in Birmingham Royal Ballet’s home city. In Black Sabbath – The Ballet expect a spectacular theatrical evening featuring thrilling dance and original Black Sabbath recordings (including Paranoid and Iron Man) alongside full orchestrations of their work (another first) and original new orchestral compositions inspired by the sound of metal – all performed live by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia.
In the second of three Birmingham-focussed commissions, Carlos Acosta was drawn to both the band’s work and its musical legacy as the originators of Heavy Metal. This full-evening ballet promises to be a unique undertaking with three composers and three choreographers, led by renowned Choreographer Pontus Lidberg (whose work has been performed by the Swedish Royal Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet) and Composer Chris Austin (whose work includes orchestrating the White Stripes music for Wayne McGregor’s Chroma) working alongside award-winning writer Richard Thomas (Jerry Springer, The Opera) to create an extraordinary metal symphony over three acts. Black Sabbath themselves have been closely involved in developing this unique collaboration.
And then, a brief bit of The Metal Philosophy in the news as black metal church burnings got a pre-COVID media writeup:
The rock genre of metal distinguished itself from other genres through its dark worldly outlook. Many of its lyrics dealt with themes of demonology and death that contrasted with the popular music of the times.
By the 1980s, metal as a genre had become commercially successful in Europe and North America. Around that time, other bands also emerged that believed metal should shock listeners rather than seek only commercial success.
Many of the younger Scandinavian black metal bands believed that the “purity” of their ancient Norse culture had been diluted by the influence of Judeo-Christian religions. Many of these musicians publicly embraced religions like Asatru, which worships the old Norse gods that predated the arrival of Christianity in Scandinavia. They professed admiration for Viking resistance to Christianization and for the strength of Norse deities like Thor.
I took these paragraphs out of a lot of context discussion to make a point: black metal is about the older gods who were not moral gods, not so much the question of atheism-versus-spirituality or the political proxy of moral-egalitarianism-versus-natural-selection.
In Christianity, gods are made into humans who apply human intentions. They find it tewibble, absolutely tewibble that any person anywhere be left out of the equality of human socializing and its moral counterpart, forcing everyone to be nice and good even if they are bad and will simply find other venues to (legally!) express that badness, like selling goyslop to credulous grey NPCs or turning on Fox News on televisions in tire shops.
The ancient gods were not moral. They, like nature, rewarded strength and clarity. They hated insanity, stupidity, perversity, criminality, and other forms of parasitic weakness. The gods thought it was funny when retards and idiots got eaten by bears, and they were not going to lie about it.
Natural selection after all rewards those who take care of themselves, and in human groups, those who work together toward goals instead of trying to pacify everyone. Natural selection is not egalitarian or vegan, but it is not Christian or libertarian either. It endorses strength including leadership.
This terrifies the modern person because modernity, from the Magna Carta to the Peasant Revolts to The Enlightenment™ and the French Revolution, has been about bourgeois individualism, or everyone doing whatever they want (weakness) while subsidized by society.
This, too, is what metal is about: rising above the herd, but then recognizing that the herd is lies and needs to be destroyed for humanity to get to the next stage of its evolution.
Speaking of evolution, the Daily Fail carries an entertaining segment on the current egghead boffin theories about the appeal of rock music under which they lump metal like most credulous normies, of course:
‘Music that shares aural characteristics with the vocalizations of distressed animals captures human attention and is uniquely arousing,’ said Daniel Blumstein, one of the study’s authors and chair of the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
When the music featured distortion, subjects rated it as more exciting than the compositions without distortion. They also were more likely to describe the music as charged with negative emotion.
The researchers believe the effect of listening to music with distortion is similar to hearing the cries of animals in distress, a condition that distorts animals’ voices by forcing a large amount of air rapidly through the voice box.
Academics always miss the obvious because they make their living by hyping details into worlds. The big truths of human existence will never make anyone rich or promoted; they are both obvious and controversial, so writing about them is a path to obscurity (hint: post links to this site everywhere).
The obvious in this case is that metal does not resemble animal cries, but human calls that embrace distress and suffering, such as in war and during the hunt. They are not cries of protest, but of exultation and exhaltation, urging us to come together to slay the beast (the herd and its pretenses).
Normies accepted metal in order to neuter it and through one of the once-great hopes of metal, they now get the ultimate normie dream: everything unique merged into a fungible dough out of which they can shape their own autistic hopes and fears, symbolized by neutered alt-country-hardrock band Metallica:
Metallica became a mainstream rock act long ago, but it’s tried hard to never lose its credibility in the metal world. Since the release of 2003’s “St. Anger,” new Metallica albums have mostly been evaluated based on how they compared with the group’s raw, early, pre-superstardom work, and Metallica’s ’90s experiments with balladry and a variety of rock styles now seem in the distant past.
When you make it to The Wall Street Journal, you are no longer just accepted, but you are a new pop commodity, because in Keynesian societies, taxes subsidize the consumers, which means that consumer spending dwarfs more practical and realistic ventures like business.
But all of metal is judged according to its past. We all are: you cannot escape your roots, and if you become discontinuous with your roots, it is clear that you have been subverted by herd morality. At that point, no one can trust you, and no one trusts Metallica anymore.
As modern civilization craters through the ruins of Late Stage Democracy and diversity, people are looking for ways to withdraw, and that includes getting back to the idea of owning physical copies of music instead of ephemeral, centrally-controlled downloads, leading to a boom in cassette tapes:
On ten occasions last year, cassettes accounted for more than 10 per cent of the chart sales of the No 1 album on the weekly Official Albums Chart. And more than a fifth of each album’s first-week chart sales were in cassette format.
The cassette tape was developed by Philips in the early 1960s – but its heyday came two decades later when the popularity of the Sony Walkman helped to drive sales in the UK alone to a peak of 83million in 1989.
Cassettes led the UK album market between 1985 and 1992 before being overtaken by CDs. By 2012, annual sales had dropped to below 4,000.
Most of this surge comes from hipsters, who are trying to rediscover a past they never experienced but realize at some level was more sane and stable. They cannot recapture the music of the past through the media of the past, but they will try nonetheless.
Consider that vinyl sales are also surging:
For the first time since 1987, vinyl sales have overtaken in CDs as interest in the format continues to grow.
The growth has been consecutive for the last seven years. According to data from the Recording Industry Association of America, U.S. vinyl sales reached 41.3 million in 2022, compared to 33.4 million CDs sold in the same year.
Most normies are still buying downloads from Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. Their music is edgy but not actually controversial, so they do not need to worry about the herd editing, censoring, or removing it. They can enjoy their products just like any McDonald’s customer.
Speaking of how things get censored, we might look toward school shooter Audrey Hale, who professed enjoyment of:
Classical, Orchestra, Death Metal, Rock.
This ties in with recent public comparisons between metal and classical music from unusual sources, creeping out into the mainstream in little dribs and drabs amidst the usual blathering and chaos:
Chialo has since compared the musical complexity of metal with classical music.
Consider that with the rise of Machine Learning (sometimes called “Artificial Intelligence” by votards) and the democratization of recording technology including Autotune, almost anyone can sound slick… but that makes it hard to tell the real from the plastic, which is why downtechnologizing has gained some momentum:
While synthesists initially embraced the ease of use and novelty of digital’s black-boxed preset sounds, widespread adoption of digital sounds ultimately undermined musicians’ occupational goal of distinctive creative expression. In response, synthesists articulated preferences for technology that afforded control, enabling them to use their expertise to create sounds, and that provided an embodied connection with the tool. Synthesists associated these affordances with analog rather than digital instruments, leading to renewed demand for analog and the reemergence of a formerly displaced technology.
How this applies to black metal recorded through a blown-out boombox onto a five-year-old Dell and then resampled into ProTools one is not entirely sure, but it seems that there is more flexibility in nature than in technology, commerce, or human intentions.
~~~
A flashback to the 1980s when Headbangers Ball ruled the airwaves because we had three big channels and they all hated metal:
Now thanks to equality and inclusion, we have no social standards, so everyone embraces metal, which means that it has imported normie attitudes and techniques, and by doing so, ceased to become what made it unique and powerful.
Back to the views, which presumably are the reason why you have come here and (maybe) read this far.
~~~
Phlebotomized – Clouds of Confusion: the problem with Phlebotomized has never been a lack of musical talent, but a tendency toward normie forms of music instead of accepting death metal and expanding its language, sort of like sticking a Tuscan or Japanese façade on a standard suburban box house instead of designing one that fits into the hills and forests, which continues here with these hard rock infused songs that borrow from a dozen other genres but never quite coalesce into a vision of their own.
Ungod – Bewitched by Sins and Lust: clearly well-executed, this album is nonetheless blighted by absurdly squawky vocals and lots of old heavy metal and punk riffs, which detract from whatever otherworldly atmosphere it hoped to create, but songs although simple are well-assembled and feature a number of non-standard parts, allowing each one to shape its own destiny and bring about some vision other than simply being in a band trying to puke out an album before the alimony payment and cartel protection money are due.
Systemik Viølence – Negative Mangel Attitude: punk went emo once people tried to mix in bourgeois singing music like The Clash and Fugazi, but this band of furious punks return with grindcore speeds but riffs that aim more toward a Discharge-style drone with abrupt conclusions in their idiosyncratic but simple song structures, keeping a focus on late 1970s and early 1980s hardcore punk with a balance between abrupt battery and unleashed human hopes in energetic whole intervals emerging from minor key and chromatic moods.
Static Abyss – Aborted From Reality: although this attacks with a sloppy grindcore fusion with speed metal riffing, its core is a kind of doom metal merged into a more aggressive and less sensitive type of post-metal, ending up somewhere like a cross between Godflesh, Voivod, and Creepmime that drops into a simple riff pair and then highlights the contrast between those with melodic rhythm guitar that creates an evanescent sense of melancholy and emptiness in an atmosphere of unsettled violence and decay.
Nekus – Death Nova Upon the Barren Harvest: in times of chaos, people try to get back to their roots through primitivism, and this band works by creating a strong texture and then shifting rhythm in the foreground, but this technique or tactic can only have so much effect, and works well if you set it up correctly, which in this highly repetitive release cannot occur simply because of the intense focus on achieving a sound rather than sculpting it.
Beastmaker – Body and Soul: NWOBHM with a focus on soulful vocals in the style of Budgie meets modern punk and stoner doom metal in this collection of simple songs that fit conventional patterns and emphasize harmony in the vocals, therefore make this much more listenable for normies, but the metal fans might note a lack of expressing riffcraft, although some of the prog conventions allow these songs to remain interesting past the majority of their verse-chorus loops.
Winterblade – Greatest Saga: bouncy Pantera-style speed metal with folk-metal and medieval surfacing, this band delivers a modern metal sense of groove and rhythm like Meshuggah on a jazz trip but underneath it very similar riffs and dinner theater style carnival music driven by the vocals, which makes it hard to want to listen to once, but after repeated rhythms, it feels like recycled vomit of past metal genres put in a washing machine for a spin cycle.
Vasudeva – Generator: sometime around 2013 tech-death simply got taken over by the Berklee guitar crowd who promptly turned it into harmony-aware jazz fusion that consequently cannot write melodies or songs, but instead creates backdrops for jamming and interrupts them with metalcore riffs before going back to the Kenny G and Pat Metheny territory, which is interesting if you like minor changes in harmony for your typical licks instead of compelling songs.
Sarvekas – Woven Dark Paths: black metal turned into carnival music around 1995 because no one could compose thematically like the old bands, so they barfed out the same old heavy metal but broke up its verse-chorus loops with borrowings from other genres including black metal, and ended up making circus music where each riff is a distracting scene and the whole thing amounts to nothing but is tied together with a crowd-pleasing riff, and this release sadly is no different.
Teitanblood – Accursed Skin: making metal based around boring cadence and pompous projected intellectual pretense of depth rather than exciting contrast, conflict, and development is OK I guess, but many of us prefer that something actually happen, which in this release occurs rarely, and instead you get a lot of trudging or charging, just like bad speed metal fell back onto chugging and bouncing, while the vocals swan and peacock as the only organized lead instrument.
Kjeld – Ôfstân: not a terrible followup to their earlier work, but perhaps too internally similar, most notably in the way that tempi and riff forms are very similar, making this feel more like an album observed from a moving train than a finished product, with attempts to make Deathspell Omega style wandering melodies that most succeed more than the original but sometimes come across as cake icing on a meatloaf.
Kaal Akuma – Turiya: despite some strong OSDM stylings, this band is at heart working within the post-metal framework, with lots of minor key diminishing melodies aiming for resonant atmosphere between charging one- and two-chord riffs and guitar squeals, essentially like a millennial horror movie trying to build atmosphere for a great release that turns out to be anticlimax because millennials fear conflict more than overpriced avocado toast.
Rebaelliun – The Hell’s Decrees: this band was the breaking trend of the minute some years ago, and indeed one can see why people were fooled into this, because it is essentially heavy metal structures with death metal riffs and a few throwaway budget riffs for transition, but has great presentation and, most of all, a great drummer who knows how to pace each song to allow it to breathe while keeping energy high, but these riffs are uninteresting and the songs while not random not really purposeful either.
Solar Mass – Pseudomorphosis: we see a lot of this lately, high concept bands that are basically Bay Area speed metal mixed with early death metal, producing updated versions of the verse-chorus metal of the 1970s with more advanced riff technique but rarely the phrasal riffs creating a dialogue that expands context like the best of death metal did, leaving us in a loop of the directionless.
Malicia – Silencioso Dolor Que Aniquila: mostly charging riffs in the Blood or Dead Infection style, this release grinds hard despite the black metal vocals, but relies too much on pulsing and stop-start activity to build its momentum, often relying on a single riff per song, which drops it into somewhat linear territory which might have worked in 1987 or if the riffs were a bit more idiosyncratic, but as it is, it comes across as quirky grinding metal which is more impulse than realization.
Whoresnation – Mephitism: artists have to realize that they are the projectors of shadows on the cave walls just as much as propagandists, advertisers, lobbyists, experts, pundits, newscasters, and politicians; if you project the beautiful in darkness — this is the essence of metal: transcendence — you create power in the world, but if you project the fatalistic, hopeless, individualistic self-expression, or the usual human lust for power, you end up as entropic as this listless brutal death metal with lotsa punk riffs.
Universally Estranged – Reared Up in Spectral Predation: essentially instrumental-dominated speed metal with a progressive touch, adding too many disparate elements to maintain a theme except through repetition, this band works in all sorts of riffs but does not make them talk to each other, so these songs never achieve a memorable or evocative quality, but the use of ultra-guttural whisper vocals as a rhythm instrument reminds me of the good days of old industrial.
Spellsword – Night of the Grail: someone updated the music from when black, death, and speed metal were barely distinct from each other and often crossed over to make this melodic and energetic take on epic heavy metal with a strong backing in modern riffing and rhythm, keeping at its heart the classic heavy metal that later melted into power metal, keeping an exuberant and heroic theme with a melancholic edge and high variety in songs.
Katavasia – Invoking the Spirit of Doom: in modern lore, hard work should pay off, but in reality, talent pays off. This band does everything right but is just boring. They come up with reasonably unique riffs, stitch them together in songs that while they do not have much internal dialogue, at least relate to each other, then cut out the extraneous and keep the music hard-hitting and focused, but it is simply not that interesting. We are not equal.
The Kryptik – A Journey to the Darkest Kingdom: in the parlance of the grubby-handed proles who buy music, “symphonic” means “uses keyboards” and “black metal” means a certain vocal style, so you get garbage plate submissions like this hard rock band that uses blasting drums behind formless riffs and soaring keyboards with torn-kleenex vocals and random discursive elements to create the sensation or impression of something deep and meaningful when in fact it is the aristic equivalent of looking down a street at the collage of neon signs.
Omega – Nebra: the problem with Reddit-metal is that it tries to be deep and burns out any decent concept it encounters, here demonstrated in a post-metal band that focuses on droning choruses and churning riffs that have no shape or direction, but then throws in some lite jazz to distract from the emptiness of it all, being as much a product as an American grocery store beer but hiding that being careful hipster artifice and victim basement nerd aesthetics.
Sorcier des Glaces / Ende – Les Puits des Mortes: some bands seem like a good idea on paper but do not hold up to repeated listening, and the disjointed merging of melodic Dark Funeral styled metal, Deathspell Omega sprawling riffs, and droning ambience does not work for SdG here, since it results in vocal-dominated songs without direction; Ende likes the sweeping, folk-style open strum type of droning black metal with keyboards, producing a pleasant ambience with no internal change.
Sisyphean – Through Corrosion: in this episode of “What Is Pretending to Be Black Metal This Week?” we have a new winner, namely modern metal band Sispyphean sneaking in their Pantera groove riffs beyond a cloud of sweep-strumming and post-metal melodies which ornament rather than drive songs which despite all their internal variation are cyclic, sort of like how going to twenty different desks in a bureaucracy is not variation but sameness.
Gastric Phantasm – Gastric Phantasm: like Intestine Baalism, the name here possibly reflects the belief that all of human philosophy originates in the gut and its need to rationalistically justify being fed, but the band launches into a creative form of grindcore that concentrates on a few riffs arrayed in a changing circle with introductions and discursive tangents that solidify the whole, fostering an environment of mystery and surreality in the midst of raging chaos.
Ventr – Numinous Negativity: heavily repetitive short-phrase melodic black metal, this band trudges along in linear songs with relatively little variation between riffs, therefore almost no development, and with that a repetitive incessant pounding that makes one question why at every stage of the process — practicing, writing, live, recording, editing, mastering, publishing — someone did not question the wisdom of going through with this project.
S.V.E.S.T. – Scarification of Soul: after black metal had spoken its motivation and expressed its philosophy, a void was created, and bands like S.V.E.S.T. rose to the occasional by dressing up bog ordinary black metal in complexity, using longer songs and more riff changes but still building them around plodding riffs like Bathory redone by Phineas Gage so that people could tap their toes every other minute and then be cowed by the bedazzled randomness into think they had a “deep” listening experience.
Tags: cassette, Headbanger's ball, Naturalism, smr, vinyl
Two years ago former DMU writer David told me he was going to put out Dawning Mount Um on Hessian Firm record label and has since become non responsive and flaked completely. That is no way to treat musicians Don’t do business with Hessian Firm or cover their releases ever again. They lead you on and then leave you high and dry. I call for a boycott of Hessian Firm.
Guess this is why bands want to be on big labels (still get screwed over), or self-release.
David does not own Hessian firm. Have you tried contacting the guy who actually owns and runs the label? Sammath did not seem to have a problem working with them…..
Thank Satan for Hessian Firm! It removed all the mentally lazy tendie nerds from the audience here so they can go talk and talk and talk about how deep some shit third tier band from Norgay is. It was like skimming the scum off a pond… Hessian Firm took away all of the wimpy Reddit geeks and left the people with normal testosterone and serotonin levels behind. If you signed to that fucking hack label, you are getting exactly what should be expected. They fawn over the big bands but are gonna shit on you brah.
What the hell? Dudes pretty much just talk about the same classics that have been “approved” by DMU.
Brett Michaels is at it again
I’d say that a 20 paragraph sperg vomit which could be summed up as “reality is merciless and this is part of its beauty, we must reflect on this and it is key to metal music” is completely unnecessary and GET TO THE FUCKING REVIEWS BRETT FOR FUCK’S SAKE
I’d say this but I’ve been here before.
Page down key is hard.
Not as hard as being concise, apparently.
You say it is not concise; easy for you, since you offer nothing of similar complexity here.
I do, but only because what you wrote wasn’t particularity complex in the first place.
Don’t take it personally. I generally enjoy your writing and was trying to give a lighthearted criticism of the article by referencing the autistic reputation this site enjoys.
You found a lack of content there? How interesting. We continue to attempt to support Autistic-Americans at this site, mainly because other than the obese, the autistic puzzle pieces among us are the most reliable voting and consuming plurality in the pluralistic dystopia.
Hey Brett, speaking of bad “metal” can you please refrain from committing any terrorist attacks on the Dethklok/Babymetal concert in Houston this August? I’m sure you’ve been putting a lot of work into planning it, but my 19 year old tranny girlfriend promised me sodomy if I take “her” so I would appreciate if you lay off this time. Or at least move your plans to the Dallas show. Thanks.
Allahu Ackbar!
There is not enough Zyklon-B or smallpox infected blankets to purge that herd of üntermenschen from this Gay earth.
Dethcock is still around?
This is what happens when the industry tries to squeeze the last few drops out of two trends whose time passed years ago.
Millennials thought death metal was funny so they found some loser to make entertaining music by ripping off and simplifying riffs from better bands. Back in the day, we told him that this was a bad idea.
I remember seeing a DVD case of that show a long time ago and the writing on the back was a direct parody of you (he was clearly hurt), meaning no matter what the main guy does he will always have a voice in the back of his going “kiiillll youuuurseeellllfff fuuuuuuuggggguuuuutttt” however he is a normie and it’s possible he’s already forgotten everything.
Normies just care about the paycheck and attaboys at the bar. “Look, Ma, I’m famous!” Yes, and now the real challenge to your soul begins.
I finally spike with David. He is a good man. Andis an intellectual. Please support his record label. And buy him. Hacker Pschore at the pub if possible. Let’s all please support Polka too. Frankie Yanchovich is sorely missed.
What the hell are you talking about?
You did not speak with me 2 years ago and you have not spoken to me recently.
You’re certainly not Cefala and I have no idea what you’re trying to stir up,but aside from writing a few articles for Hessian Firm in 2023 I have had no relationship with the affair.
We’re going to start selling Verified Accounts here in the next few months. For just $8 a month, we verify your identity and put a blue pentagram next to your name.
Fire 80% of ANUS staff.
Monetize DMU.
Post Memes in story form every day.
Did he ever figure out who exactly stole the keeshka?
Brett, have you read Aeschylus’ Agamemnon? – I mean really read the whole text and contemplated its meaning?
You’ve been pumping Plato for so long, but really Plato was somewhat of a pussy compared to the Greeks before him. Aeschylus fought at Marathon, mastered the poetic word of tragedy and gave us a glimpse of the true religion of the classical Greeks.
Meanwhile, you love Plato because in the Republic he mentions eugenics (stolen from the Spartans) and national character (stolen from Hippocrates) or because he proposes the ‘ideal’ government (falsely – each race has its own politics and corresponding government) or the theory of Ideas (the influence of Pythagoras here, but reality is NOT mathematics) or whatever, who knows. But Plato represents the decline of the Greeks, both with his ideas and even as a character: not good enough as a poet to be among the great playwrights, not good enough as a politician to have an durable impact, he was left with philosophy where finally he could create an abstract perfect system and (pre-Christian!) myths and morality. Sounds good in theory, fails in real life.
Aeschylus, or rather the religion of the Greeks that is discerned through his plays, is more straight-forward, realist and noble than all of Plato. They did not deny civilization or nature, but integrated this naturalism into their patriotism – even if limited to the polis. They where well aware of divine justice – the real one, that spares no one. No delusions, no mercy, but of course with distinctions according to the habits and character of each people. Rightfully said here, “good to the good and bad to the bad”, but all this before Plato and not abstractly, but as a fight for one’s people and civilization, minus the misanthropy. They did not want to exterminate the herd ok? – that’s just a loser attitude.
But thank you for the post, a fun read as always.
Do you identify with the herd? Must be one of those new genders. Plato does not endorse much but tells us the differences in effects from different causes and links them to a root cause in human psychology. There is a reason I prefer him above the others: he is more complete and penetrating.
Plato was quite fluid, though bot gender fluid.
But not as fluid as this pesto, which is quite good. The Italians are not human but their food is entertaining.
Never once have I seen food described as “entertaining”, unless its still alive.
Some food one eats for entertainment, such as Taco Bell, which also provides entertaining spontaneous non-consensual bowel movements.
The ‘herd’ also includes some friends and family members – not just those huge human-whales you might see at Wallmart. Should they ALL perish, just because they’re normies? The Globalists are actively trying to accomplish this – whether intentional or just for profit. Welcome to the club of humans playing God (hint: doesn’t end well). Nature comes back with a vengeance and gives everyone his due. Bill Gates’ daughters are f*cking n*ggers. Dorky ideas, dorky consequences, genius.
Meanwhile, from an evopsych standpoint, civilization and beautiful things were not built through misanthropy. Normies wanna be normies – it’s out of them that some will rise up, lead and create the good things. The non-misanthropic alternative is to carefully improve the general level (the exact opposite of today) – respecting human natural limits and accepting local differences trump ‘ideal’ solutions. The ‘agon’ culture of the classical Greeks was best in this.
After Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, of course Plato should be mandatory reading – he’s the one that got us into this mess by creating political philosophy. But he’s less metal than the Classics – it’s not neutral commentary, the dialogues make it clear what he endorses. Between the Republic and the Laws, he ran into some real political troubles with his ‘ideal’ government, so in the end he proposes a more concrete ‘polis’. Being a genius does not mean you’re right. Nature, reality, God is more complex than any human mind could ever foresee.
Yes, of course. Next question.
No, they are trying to do the opposite: keep the normietards and get rid of anyone who might notice or know better.
Bill Gates married a [[[ non-human ]]]. Not surprisingly, his O’Gates children have considered the slide into third world miscegenation. Poor Bill was a talented Lead Technician but he has not done well at anything more complex, sort of like Zuckerberg, the Google guys, Jack Dorsey, and Albert Einstein. The only ones to come out doing well are Paul Allen and that Leon Musk guy.
Its ok man, the likes of Gayts 2.0 is already practicing eugenics and breeding an army of übermenschen.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12003601/American-couple-head-pronatalist-movement-insist-NOT-eugenics-despite-using-embryo-selection.html
Nothing wrong with eugenics, but that is not what most of these people are doing. They want to engineer humanity, like social engineering or scientific management, just the newest form of “progress.” For a great critique of this, try C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength or of course the redoubtable Naked Lunch from William S. Burroughs. Science fiction tackles it as well, usually indirectly like in Robert A. Heinlein Citizen of the Galaxy or Ray Bradbury The Martian Chronicles. Hard to miss Mary Shelley Frankeinstein, but the archetype of that might even be Hermann Melville Moby-Dick. You guys should love that, it has “dick” in the title.
But isn’t the outlook that nature is essentially perfect and life essentially good just another coping mechanism? In the face of existence as a mistake, an unfortunate imbalance in the universe? Or is that not a problem as you see it?
There is no perfection in the world in the sense of everything being good, safe, and ideal. Perfection is a human conceptual projection. If someone created perfection, it would require a static and two-dimensional universe which would quickly be eaten alive by entropy. In the usage above, perfection refers to tradeoffs: natural has optimized its order for resilience, endurance, and quality. It is the best option, and most importantly, it is better than the human concept.
As far as the assertion in your first sentence goes, your logic teachers should be sodomized. “But isn’t” — this is not an argument, but a begging-the-question fallacy. You just presented a psychology and asked if this argument could have a home under it, instead of looking at the cause-effect of this argument. There are coping mechanisms, but those tend to rationalize human decisions, not those of nature.
Now on to the interesting stuff. Is existence a mistake? Obviously not, in a streamlined system like the one I describe. In fact, I would think its role is rather obvious, and that there is a purpose to us being here, although it is tautological. The purpose of life is to live well, and as part of that, one sees certain things, and those notions have some utility beyond the individual meatsac experience.
Yes, and perhaps that deathlike, two-dimensional state is a “better” perfection than the one demanding tradeoffs, and so we start to rationalize this lesser perfection by talking about purpose, living well etc.
Lesser perfection is actually perfect because it functions. This is the sane component to “might is right”: function is better than Utopianism.
Would that mean that life is worth any amount of potential boredom and suffering because at least said life functions?
Boredom, no, but remember, Boredom is only the final suffering we’re delivered unto when we run out of other sufferings because our “needs” are “met”. Suffering, yes, because, to quote Schopenahuer yet again, “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” (this topic is covered in more depth in Book IV of “On the World as Will and Representation”, so add that to your reading list if you have further questions).
Suffering and money, both essential to successful tradeoffs.
The need to regulate one’s expectations certainly doesn’t speak well of life, and assuming we are somehow redeemed once we’ve served our time is sheer superstition, no less a coping mechanism than Leibniz’s optimism.
At some point, we are struggling between religious views — “is there an inherent goal? how do we know when we have palliated the blood god?” — and naturalism. Naturalism says life is its own goal, like everything else it has purpose, and nothing is wasted, even in energy waste, because it cycles back into something bigger. Hopeful naturalism says that the spirits of the bold, good, and decent endure while the endless üntermenschen become nutria living in an abandoned Family Dollar somewhere near Cleveland, Texas.
Yup. Hope-cope all the way.
At some point, realism wins out; we can see that this universe made itself into an amazing place, which points toward a certain type of hope at the root of everything. But the hope-cope is an attempt to enforce human control on this.
“In the face of existence as a mistake, an unfortunate imbalance in the universe?”
Schopenhauer brings us the answer — existence is the result of an unfortunate mishap, but it itself isn’t the mistake, but rather the process through which the mistake is corrected.
Here I have to differ from Schopenhauer: it is only logical after the transition from nothingness to somethingness that consciousness would arise, and therefore life is an outgrowth of logic, and with that, existence as we know it.
And since Brett will be along shortly to add this, I’ll beat him to the punch — this is an idea that Schopenhauer explicitly took from the ancient Hindus.
You guys are masters of autistic circular logic. I won’t worry though, you’re gonna die like the rest and be eternally forgotten if there’s nothing on the other side.
By that reasoning as if anything matters really – acting like a bunch of pseudo-pagan keyboard warriors who think they know reality, when you don’t know shit. Get out there and do some killing for your “cause” already or shut the fuck up, because you’re just as much of useless waste of flesh like the people you’re mocking. I bet the “failures” out there, are happier than you guys, so that makes them the winner.
Blessed are the sick indeed.
ASSHOLE BASTARD
The pagans believed in The Other Side, too. There are also godless adualists who are both devout and opposed to the anthropogenic conception of divinity. Personally, I think the agnostics have the most defensible position, atheists either believe in the divine in a non-personified form or are boring imaginationless Communists, and most organized internationalist religion is The Jew™ as described by Nazis, Arabs, and Catholics. Most of us who detest OIR are simply opposed to its foreign, written, and moralistic nature. Hail Satan!
Yeah, it’s coping when THEY do it.
We might compare to religion. Internationalist organized religion is generally pro-cope, but some use it for more intelligent ends.
The notion that there even are ends is surrogate activity.
Inherent ends? In a human sense, no; in a naturalistic sense, of course. Life exists because it can exist and therefore will maximize the opportunity. Pure capitalism.
Sure, it’s a directed process. That inherently entails meaningless suffering.
Suffering is often the condition of having not achieved what one must. Sometimes it is just negative feedback to unrealistic actions. Thus, you guessed it… not all suffering is equal (but we are all guaranteed to suffer).
Indeed, some creatures are destined to suffer immensely most of the time, while others are lucky enough to be spared some of the most terrifying possibilities, but it all leads to the same conclusion: life as a whole is broken and we are its bitches, and in order not to go insane, we make up excuses for how badly it’s treating even its most fortunate tenants.
As a nihilist, I find “life is broken” to be insufficient sort of like the megachurch explanations of God as your good buddy who just wants you to have a phat 401k and love Jesus. Life is what it is; it also works. This implies something benevolent and intelligent behind it, even if not consciously so. The latter two words are the big sticking point between most of us Proto-Indo-European Religion (PIER) type people and the internationalist organized religion (IOR, pronounced “eeyore”) folks. That, and they wish to criminalize exuberant homosexual fisting as if it were some kind of perversion, anomaly, or infection. Praise the Fist!
Insufficient, you say, and then you give me “Life is what it is; it also works”? Jolly good show!
As a bicyclist, I’ll clarify: It’s easy to imagine a an existence in which pain, boredom and disappointments are not inevitable elements. Such an existence would be so much better than than the one we find ourselves in. The latter is then a “broken” version of the former.
Except the former doesn’t exist. What you’re doing is wordplay, not philosophy. I don’t see life the way you do and my only reason is that I think life is cool. I know what I like. And it’s hazardous brevity drives me to not waste my time and energy on stupid shit.
Life works. It has so far channeled nothingness into somethingness and made hummingbirds, peacocks, condors, and eagles out of it. This is alchemy of the first order.
An existence without suffering would be easy to imagine, but much of what gives our lives meaning is that we choose not to blindly suffer, but instead have our suffering mean something and extract something from it, whether wealth or wisdom.
“It’s easy to imagine a an existence in which pain, boredom and disappointments are not inevitable elements.” — is it really? How would that work at all? The very nature of existence means that when there’s no other suffering for us to work to alleviate, no other suffering to fill the void, we’re instantly delivered unto a greater demon in boredom. If existence was inherently positive in concept, boredom wouldn’t exist — after all, when all needs were met and there was no need for striving, we’d simply revel in the experience of existence instead of experiencing boredom. The nature of existence itself demands suffering, the two concepts can’t be separated.
(Brett will disagree with the above, but I find Schopenhauer’s arguments convincing.)
Having written on this in the past, I can only repeat what Art himself says: in a relative universe, we do not know hot without cold, so we do not know beauty without ugliness and pleasure without pain.
Taking more of a homebrew view, it seems to me that the relative is part of the whole, so Schopenhauer is not quite correct. We know beauty innately, just as we find reverence for the awesome and amazing in our world. I think these things transcend the relative because they are goals in themselves, but these transcendentals — the aggression (vir), the good, the beautiful, the wisdom, the excellence (arete) — are rare in that they are the few things to which this applies. Some people also add God in there, but I find personifying the divine to be too much of humanity being a big britches prick bitch and not enough looking out there at the stars and thinking, “most of these people need to die in a mulcher.”
@Brett Stevens: True, there are many great things in life, and we should make the best of what we have, but a cruel machinery that works is still a cruel machinery, even with daffodils hanging from the cogs.
Either way, our viewpoints on existence are just as personal as those of the “socialized individualists” – even if giving it the objective flavor of naturalism probably makes it a better political weapon against those same people.
@Worldscarnilla: Discussing hypotheticals is quite useful in philosophy. Like you, I think life is cool and I like a million things in it, but I also think it’s perfectly all right to contemplate its obvious downsides. It’s not wordplay, you may be thinking of something else.
As a nihilist, I see a confusion here: all views originate in the personality of the individual, but that does not mean that all are equal, or equally self-serving. The socialized individualists project their human intentions and needs onto nature, where a naturalist seeks to avoid this.
I doubt very few people of any ideology see themselves as self-serving. We’re all realists and idealists and naturalists, and our enemies are selfish pricks.
Then it depends on how accurate they are. I agree in that most ideologies have a tripartite goal — serve the individual, misdirect others toward false targets, while hiding this fact — but they do not want to be seen as realists or naturalists. They want to be seen as humanists. This is how you can tell, as Suicidal Tendencies told you: when people talk about your best interests instead of the needs of civilization, nature, or the transcendental, you can tell that the bed is shat.
Yes, agreed, a lot of people want to seem caring and good (“humanist”), but, also, no one wants to seem stupid or unscientific. Irrespective of how we want to be seen, however, surely everyone’s worldview, including that of humanists, includes considerations of nature, civilization, transcendental possibilities etc.?
it’s just that there’s no real difference between what you’re saying and the reality that I believed as a child raised hardcore christian, and without the benefit of skepticism, which is that I would eventually inhabit heaven some day, where life would be without suffering, and the only meaning to be extracted from suffering in this life is that it’s gods plan. its a crippling mentality. and something i have profound personal experience with.
if you really want a blissful existence on earth, you can do it, you just have to join some temple or something and dedicate your life to purging your body and mind of all distractions in order to experience as closely as possible this state of NO WORK. but most will start to feel something tugging at their soulstrings, just like what brought them there in the first place.
Jobs are a spiritual dead zone.
I largely agree, and in case you mistook my meaning I meant work in the sense of working towards some goal with one foot in civilization and all the shit you have to deal with as a result. No doubt that mastering meditation or whatever in a cave is hard work but for most I think they like the idea of it and fall off on the way.
In my view, it would be worth making an infinite and eternal civilization, and the only way to do that is to eliminate all nonsense and time-wasting, then follow Plato and natural selection: good to the good, bad (removal) to the bad, and leave everyone else alone to see if they can discover an inner self and soul in light of the cold limitlessness of all time.
You misunderstand. I’m critiquing a certain comprehension of what life is, not how we should approach it. I’m saying nothing about what happens when we die or if there are other kinds of existence than ours. And what I’ve hypothesized certainly contains no divine plan. With the experiences you’ve had, however, I can imagine those assumptions are close at hand.
I get you, I just think that if you really felt what you think then you wouldn’t be on DMU discussing it, and that’s not a value judgement on your decision to do so, more of an observation cuz I guess I got nothing better to do than like think about stuff atm
@Cynical: The only reason we have brains that are never truly satisfied, easily get bored, scared, tired, pissed and sad is because they’re made for survival (which has to do with this universe’s tendency to change over time). It’s only for the sake of survival that we “need” the contrast between suffering and boredom, to keep hunting, eating, sleeping and procreate. A mind that would only feel constant bliss would die in this universe, but in a universe where food, sleep and sex are not necessary for existence, such a vessel of paradisical experience would be possible. It would demand a radically different sort of universe, but that’s kind of the point.
All hypotheticals like this are fascinating BS just like the ontological arguments. Many critiques of the latter. Has any logical argument ever meant that something actually exists? Hume talked about this. Logics is not existence. There is a universe-wide difference between the little human thought of ‘oh suffering so bad how I wish it were not’ and the actualization through God of “a radically different sort of universe”. Your observations are good, but the discussion itself is boring.
A far more interesting question would be – like that funny German once wondered: what does this sort of questioning tell us about the writer (you)?
This discussion is just my being skeptical of metaphysics justifying politics, so I’m afraid it won’t say much about me as a person. Or are you asking me out?
No reason to do that. All politics begins in philosophy.
It seems to me that people think and act according to power relations and other more immediate concerns first, before forming anything like a coherent view of the world as a whole and its “bigger” questions.
I might argue that on the other hand, existence is purely logical. It could be, so it was. Then the question becomes what to do with that as the little fragments of universe-code that we are.